CX 1st Steps: How to Start your Customer Experience for the Biggest Impact

Are you new to CX (Customer Experience)? Trying to help your company understand what CX is and is not? Want to link CX to what matters to your CEO? Not sure where to start?

Answering these questions as a new or experienced CX leader is not only a common starting point but a very useful way to reflect on how things are going with your CX efforts.

First, let’s begin with “What is CX?” A lot of companies with CX tools and point solutions are jumping on the CX bandwagon. Many of these tools are useful, but they are typically not ideal places to start.

For example, an easy way to start your CX efforts is with a survey program. While asking customers for their feedback is a good thing, the hard part is ensuring you have impactful questions that link back to what your customers consider pain points or decision points (what we call ‘moments of truth’ in CX) and you have a process to respond and communicate effectively your findings. Driving prioritized actions is key from an effective survey program. So as you can see, it is not as simple as hire a VOC technology company and implement a survey. Designing the questions, process, and communications within your corporation are also part of your CX effort.

What CX is NOT

CX is not CRM, it includes much more depth and breadth of data and attitudes of the customer lifecycle than CRM, and the main purpose of CRM is about managing the sales process only. CX is not Customer Service, although they play a major role in the post-sales lifecycle of the customer, it is only one part of the CX journey your customers go through with your company. CX is not the website, although there are touchpoints in that interaction that play a critical part of CX. CX is not UX – digital user experience is more of the design and graphical nature of what the customer might experience, but it is not CX.

What CX is

CX is a corporate program with the purpose to manage the customer experience across the lifecycle of a customer, sponsored by an executive and involves most of the various business functions of a company. In fact, CX ends up becoming a cultural shift to become a more customer-centric company. A large part of the CX program also involves an internal effort to engage and train team members with the behaviors and skills that are required to place their customers first every day, even if they are internal customers.

What you want is a program that can identify clear actions, produce immediate results, and long-term results that are measurable and important to the CEO and BoD so they can justify the program long term and continue to fund it because of the increased revenue and reduced churn.

There are three potential starting points to CX depending on what is going on in your company at the time you launch your program: